TIL filename extensions .ogv, .ogg = Theora
The website is so unremittingly awful I didn't even spin up a Windows VM to try it. Massive, all bitmaps, almost no text, no actual info at all, mentions blockchain.
The official one is still around, but last I checked it had a crash bug in the media library plugin.
Just about everything I own can play them. Including rockbox on my sansa clip+.
Writing about ogg vorbis as if it is a historical format is silly. Sure, it wasn't adopted by streamers, but everything on Bandcamp (for example) is available as ogg/vorbis.
I think I thought of it more as a historical format because Xiph have said that Opus supersedes it.
I mostly stopped caring because of streaming some years ago now. I have my 'old' collection as a mix of mp3 and some ogg vorbis, dating from before the streaming era. These days I buy some CDs from bands I want to support, but listen to everything by streaming.
I get the whole "<Streamer of choice> pays nothing to the artists!" argument. OTOH most the stuff I stream I also own, I'm just using streaming services to save me the hassle of ripping and hosting somewhere for access by all my devices.
I’ve tried to explain how limiting any other streaming service is to friends, but I’ve mostly been met with blank stares at the mere concept of wanting to listen to off-streaming music or even where one would come across actual music files these days.
This was something google play music was supposed to do as well, though that's dead now!
It makes sense that Google Play Music offered this, as it seems like adding a whole cloud-storage stack would be prohibitively complex and expensive for a company that isn’t running their own datacenters and/or already maintaining cloud storage as part of their business. Spotify supports local files and (apparently) lets you sync them iPod-style to your phone, but that’s where I draw the line in terms of music-collection-anachronism.
Random note: you do have to convert FLAC to ALAC if you want to add lossless files to Apple Music, but that’s an easy ffmpeg one-liner.
All my music is Vorbis, Opus, or ripped m4as, and browsers take it all fine.
The first version of WebM actually used Vorbis. It's the newer ones that are Opus.
It was a "nifty but who really needs it?" idea
It worked, but my experience was that Ogg isn't really a well-designed container at all. Even QuickTime / MPEG-4 with its 1990s warts is more flexible and efficient. I would definitely pick Matroska today if I really wanted to torture myself with this kind of document format again.
Somebody else wrote more eloquently about Ogg's bizarre design choices:
https://hardwarebug.org/2010/03/03/ogg-objections/
"The variable overhead in the Ogg format comes from the page headers, mostly from the segment_table field. This field uses a most peculiar encoding, somewhat reminiscent of Roman numerals. In Roman times, numbers were written as a sequence of symbols, each representing a value, the combined value being the sum of the constituent values.
"The segment_table field lists the sizes of all packets in the page. Each value in the list is coded as a number of bytes equal to 255 followed by a final byte with a smaller value. The packet size is simply the sum of all these bytes. Any strictly additive encoding, such as this, has the distinct drawback of coded length being linearly proportional to the encoded value. A value of 5000, a reasonable packet size for video of moderate bitrate, requires no less than 20 bytes to encode."
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[1] https://github.com/pojala/twentytwenty/blob/master/twtw-ogg....